Storing Large Used World Wide Collections

Great discussion gents!


Yeah, this is a great and clever approach, I will probably do something similar for some countries. Both Chris's and Jims pages are inspiring examples for how to expand on Steiner without needing to modify them at all.

For most countries I believe the Steiner pages are good enough, and though I think they are a bit sparsely populated (requiring more albums...) the benefit of all that free space is the option to simply stick in any varieties there.



Funny, I am having a similar thoughts quite often - to introduce a cut-off year 1940/52 - then I remind myself about all those nice stamps I would miss...

I should mention that for those that are bothered by the Scott/Steiner BOB layout, the Minkus pages have all the stamps of the era (regular,semi-postal, air post, postage due etc) on the same page or nearby.

I just read this entire thread through from first post to the above post, and it only took me a few hours! Talk about dedication to the stamp hobby!

There is a great deal of useful information here on a number of stamp issues -- storage options, the best "cut-off" year, and so on.

The "best" cut-off year is impossible to generalize about Every collector will choose a different one. And as a few people have noted, it's fine to use different years, collecting some countries to a later date than others. For countries whose stamps I really like, I collect almost up to the present, but for other countries my cut-off is a early as the 1950s or so. My general worldwide collection supposedly ends in 1975 (for no particular reason) in Scott International albums, but the reality is I have so many other country albums which go to a later date that I don't really have any cut-off year.

My storage system is different brands of albums I like. For years, I searched for the perfect storage system in the perfect album. But there isn't one. For years, I used Scott Specialty albums for countries I liked to collect. But in Belgium one year I noticed some beautiful Davo albums and decided on the spot that I'd collect Belgium in Davo albums. It was 1970 and all of Belgium still fit into one volume! I've purchased later volumes of Davo Belgium for this collection which I keep on the shelves next to my now many Scott Specialty albums. So that's two brands of album.

I've purchased some collections mounted in Schaubek, Lighthouse, Lindner and other albums. Why remount them when I can enjoy them in those albums and simply add missing stamps? So I've ended up with various brands of albums. I had never thought of doing that, but now I like the variety of five or six different brands of stamp albums.

What then is the purpose of the Scott International album? It's for stamps from the other 100+ countries I don't have separate albums for. And it's for my duplicates. When you purchase other collectors' albums, you end up with many duplicates. They go into the Scott International album. Unlike its reputation as an album that omits many hard-to-find stamps, after 1940 or so the International provides spaces for nearly all of a country's stamps. It's the 1840-1940 era where Scott omits many stamps. By the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, the album pretty much (as far as I've noticed anyway) has spaces for all stamps issued. So, add this album (30 volumes, but narrower binders than the usual Scott binders) to all the other albums.

I also have dozens of binders filled with "new issue" stamps on Vario pages. These are not my main collection, just the place I put stamps until I have time to mount them in albums. There's nothing really wrong with using Vario pages as your main album, but I wouldn't like to do that. I don't find Vario pages very elegant. A binder filled with Vario pages is also really heavy. For a stamp collection, I want elegant-looking pages that are large enough to showcase my stamps. And I prefer paper pages. I mount my stamps mostly using hinges since I don't find stamp mounts necessary for any but the most special stamps.

I like the Steiner pages, but only if they're on larger sized paper which can be done using a wide-format printer. The larger page gives the stamp layout more room to breathe and just looks better to me.

As for binders, I'm not a big fan of 3-ring binders, but I do like the small Vario F binder which is especially nice to use (and small enough to pick up). Amos Advantage also sells a very nice padded 3-ring binder with a slipcase and is very inexpensive and the same size and looks almost as good as the (small) Vario F binder. The larger Vario G and Grande binders just seem too enormous. And when filled with Vario pages, they are very heavy which I don't like. My Scott albums are all in medium-sized binders, by the way, which with paper pages are not as heavy as you'd think. I do like European 22-ring binders which allow pages to lie flat. But they cost more than 3-ring binders. The very common 2-post binders may be the best option considering price. And there are also springback binders, though they are generally more expensive and require paper that can bend comfortably which not all album pages do very well today.

I'd urge anyone looking for "the" best solution for storing their stamps, the best type of binder or pages, to consider that there isn't a best system. It's probably best to use a variety of types of storage, a number of different brands of albums, and a number of different cut-off dates for countries depending on where you feel each country's stamps "should" end. Some countries' stamps are so beautiful (Sweden, Japan, Czechoslovakia, France, etc) that I can't choose a cut-off date. So I don't. With many other countries, many African and Caribbean countries that produced floods of cheap stamps, I choose a very early date.

In short, collect whatever countries you want. Cut off each country's stamps at whatever year seems best to you and not necessarily your entire collection at the same year. Use whatever storage system(s) you like the best, perhaps a combination of different types of albums of different brands. It's perfectly okay to collect for years in one type (or brand) of album, and then switch to another for later years. Clothing styles change. So do cars. Why should anyone be wedded to the same collecting approach forever?

Well, here we go again...I started playing about with alternate storage methods (again!). This is just an initial try, not sure if I will totally switch or not yet

But, there does seem to be a lot of advantages to using Vario pages:

1. No more cost for hinges and/or mounts.
2. No further damage to stamps from hinges.
3. Highlights the stamps you have, rather than the blank spaces for stamps you don't have.
4. Flexible enough to easily add varieties, interesting cancelations, covers, etc.
5. Not limited to the year cut-off of your album.
6. More compact solution than Steiner

I never before really thought much about Vario pages as a option because I always thought the labels "overshadowed" the stamps as most used white paper or were even just handwritten on regular pieces of paper. But, I thought I'd try making some black labels with white text...I just include some basic info., year, and Scott# of the series...looks pretty good I think and definitely doesn't overshadow the stamps...May try a few countries and see how I like it...

chris - minor typo Montenegro became part of Yugoslavia (or as it was known at the time, the Kingdom of Serbs Croats & Slovenes) in 1918, not 1929. 1929 was the year the country name was changed from Kingdom SCS to Yugoslavia.

Thanks Gene, to be honest, its not a typo, but I misinterpreted what I read in the Scott catalog. Thanks for clarifying.

Chris - Montenegro was also independent for decades before 1918, hence the local stamps.

I have a huge and badly sorted w/w collection.

the idea is to eventually get all of my stamps housed in 64=page stockbooks, as this is the cheapest 'album' option.

In the meantime I have the stuff waiting to be sorted in shoeboxes of envelopes, ordered by region (or country if there is enough material).

Thus 5 shoeboxes for Western Europe (not inc. Germany, which has its own shoebox).

I have about 40-odd shoeboxes or equivalent stuffed with stamps, plus about 60-odd stockbooks.

My main priority is to get rid of bulky stuff that I have bought -- mostly stripping cartons of all their non-stamp detritus, and getting rid of old albums. Because I am suffering a fairly serious space limitation.

So for most smaller countries I havent done any sorting at all -- like no sorting of any South and Central America.(but this also depends on what specialized catalogues I have available).

One thing I have found useful as an additional sorting tool is small plastic zip-bags. When I lived in Taiwan a few years back I could get a pack of 100 of these from the local stationers for a few pennies, so bought thousands. Anything that gets vaguely sorted can then be put into piles, and placed into one of these small bags, where it will retain its order. I guess most people would use glassines for this, but I had no cheap source of glassines at the time.

I always go with stock books. They always save the day! *** Edited by Staff - Please Review the rules that you agreed to when you registered. ***

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At the moment I'm creating my own pages for the classic WW stamps I have. The stamps of my home country (Belgium) I keep in stock albums. After 2000 the Belgian stamps aren't put in the stock albums anymore but just in an enveloppe (The new stamps just take in to much space).

I print the WW stamp pages on 120g/m2 paper. After they are printed, I bind them together with a plastic comb.



I also scan the stamps I have and let the software generate pages with the stamp already filled in to place on my personal website. This way I know exactly which stamp I already have when I'm not at home.
You can check the pages here:

http://postzegels.vincentvriends.be/classic.php

I only had the time to create the pages for some of the countries. It's a work in progress.

I have gotten a lot of use out of those plastic comb type of self-made notebooks over the years.

I have never tried using them for stamps, but when I use them, the main reason I like them is that the pages lay flat, and the overall footprint/width of them is small.

@vincent - your Argentina pages are great


Haha, yes - tell us about it!! Many of us are in the same boat as you and know exactly what you mean: it takes time, patience and not least persistence - but quite rewarding in the end though, when it finally is time to actually mount the stamps

Seems like you run to a lot of effort to type up all those info for each single stamp. Previously I entered catalog numbers below each single box - but then I figured - is it really any use with catalog number info if there are no other stamp in that series with the same value and thus no other stamp to confuse it with? It was simply taking too much time with little gain. So I came to the conclusion to include catalog number and description of shade, perf variety, wmk info etc only in those cases it was really required to identify one stamp from another - but no more info than absolutely required to make a positive separation between the two (or more). Saved me tons of time. So you might consider if you need to enter info like color of a stamp if there are no other stamp with the same value in that series to confuse it with?

I can see you are also running the trouble to make annotation for catalog values for each single stamp. Previously I noted catalog value for certain high value stamps, but I stopped doing that as well for the simple reason that catalog values are changing anyway. So, instead I am indicating relative values by use of 'value categories' - e.g.
Minimum/low value stamps: ' ' (no annotation at all, doesn't matter anyway!)
Value $10-$100 : '$'
Value $100-$1000: '$$' and so on

Funny you did Argentina, I just did mine as well. In this tread https://goscf.com/t/61843&whichpage=1 you will see examples of how I try to keep the requirement for annotations for each single stamp to a minimum. For stamps that cannot be confused with any other stamp under the same header I use no description beyond the value itself. (almost impossible for the classics tough due to all the varieties)

Feel free to keep up your awesome, but labor-some work... it is your pages only! ....but it is your valuable time to consider as well, so I just thought I would share some ideas to save time and get to do your pages to the letter 'Z' before....

Hey, cool thread. Here's how I keep a substantial worldwide collection, and why I do it that way.

Most of my worldwide collection is kept in 102 cards in fourteen-inch red boxes. I collect enough esoteric stuff that there isn't a pre-printed album that will work for everything, or even most of everything.

I keep them sorted and in order, Abu Dhabi #1 to Zululand #24. The method is fairly simple:

1. All newly acquired stamps are put in 102 cards and are stored in the eight-inch white boxes that 102 cards come in. I don't bother merging white boxes together, each white box might have stuff from A to Z in it, but cards are inserted in proper place as they are added, so the contents of the box itself are sorted. Since you usually add stamps to a collection in batches of the same country, inserting is trivial.

2. When a white box is filled, every card is added to the computer inventory.

3. When I have twenty or thirty full white boxes (about 15,000-20,000 new cards) I will pick an alphabetic range of countries that have enough cards to fill at least one 14 inch red box (with the complete inventory updated after each new white box, it's very easy to determine country groupings that have enough new cards, 800-900 will fill a red box). Then I take all stamps from the white boxes within those ranges and place them into new red boxes. These are merged as I go, so the new red box is sorted when I'm done.

4. The new red boxes are then merged with the existing red boxes. Since each new red box only contains stamps from a certain small range of countries, I don't have to get all the 100+ red boxes out to complete the merge, only five to ten or so. Since they're sorted, it's easy to merge with the existing boxes.

If you have a mathematics/computer science background, it's a merge sort, which is one of the most efficient algorithms. It works out in practice that step 1 (the most fun step) takes about five times longer than step 2 and twenty times longer than steps 3 and 4, which is as it should be -- spend most of the time doing the most fun stuff. By the time I have enough new material to fill a bunch of red boxes, it's usually a pleasure looking back on what I've added during steps 3 and 4, so those steps are a lot more fun than you would think.

This system, as outlined, will scale fine up to about a million cards -- around there, the final step will involve too many original red boxes and take too much time to be worth doing without hundreds of white boxes of new material. At that point, should I reach it, I'll have to consider having an "A" collection and a "B" collection, or some other refinement. I still have a long way to go before that's a problem.

I also have a bunch of paper labels that say "on exhibit" -- I will occasionally remove items from the cards and mount them on pages for an exhibit, or if I pick up a nice hingeless album I'll sometimes move stamps from the cards to the album. Then the 102 card gets the label, which can include notation identifying the location of the stamp. Moving things back and forth, should I decide to present portions of my collection another way, is easy this way.

For large multiples, souvenir sheets, covers etc. I mostly use nice stockbooks, with the stockbook items also going into the inventory with their location so I can find them later. When a stockbook is full, I (sometimes) sort the items within -- admittedly I've fallen behind on this part. I also have larger items in counter books, mint sheet folders, and boxes of 107 cards, based on size, the weather, the current phase of the moon: that's the weakest point of my game, I must admit. Sooner or later I will get my act together and impose more order on this chaos.

One objection you might have to this system is that it is missing the pleasure of seeing completed album pages, etc. But like I said, when I get a really nice album I can keep and fill it and this is accommodated by this system nicely, and then you get a whole lot of that pleasure at once. (And can have the pleasure of choosing between copies looking for the nicest example, deciding which unlisted or B-O-B items or otherwise unusual or special stamps deserve to have their own custom pages made up, etc. When you're organized like this you can keep almost anything for your collection, and the more you learn about an area and its stamps, the gladder you'll be that you can and did.) It's kind of nice to only have to insert stamps into an album once or twice, since they do have a tendency to wear if you constantly have to insert stamps in them, and it's a shame to beat up a really nice-quality stamp album.

! agree with Blaamand as I do my own pages for certain Specialties and will do more as Scott does not do it !!!....too many missing stamps.
Minimal info to save time.....I have an option to insert a copy of the stamp or leave the space empty.......also something to decide because "ink" is not cheap !!
Have done CANADA and Specialty Province New Brunswick. My software inserts automatically the space needed for the stamp and the stamp characteristics....ex: 3 cent vermillion (upper portion) and I decide what to insert in the bottom.....ex: Sc # 333 and with that I have my info that corresponds with inventory.

Blaamand has a different approach which I might adopt.
You decide what you want !!!!! Time is important when you do a WW Collection. Cheers !!

René